Today I got into one hell of a duty party in Ifrit hard. I was in there as a DPS replacement, so I don't know the whole story. But upon arriving, people were discussing battle plan. They said to slowly kill Ifrit until we build up enough Limit Break bar, so that a DPS mage can LB on all the nails when they spawn.
Everyone engaged, except a WHM, whose name I refrain from specifying because there are many of them on different servers and I do not want the other innocent ones to be misunderstood as the offender in this scene. The WHM didn't buff and didn't move. Even while we were fighting, the WHM just stood there at the start spot, never healing anyone, and never dodging any AoE.
The tank was complaining that the WHM was AFK. Other healer said "he's not AFK" and I never realized what that meant until after we voted dismiss.
After we wiped, the party voted to kick the "AFK" White Mage. But other members didn't want to stay so people started leaving.
Just then, the rest of party discussed and the other healer said the kicked person said something like bye and then stopped moving without leaving duty. They speculated that the WHM was just pretending to be AFK. I then concluded that the WHM did it so that other members will be fed up and start to vote kick them out, so that they would not face the Duty Finder cool down penalty.
Now this is one flaw of the penalty, or more specifically, the flaw of penalty exception.
I heard of stories when people would fake disconnect so that they won't get duty finder penalty. But this is even worse. The abuser would just sit there and watch the party die. It is horrible that the party is vulnerable to this kind of trolling and is forced to suffer the fake AFK (and go die in vain.)
I know that if people get penalty for being vote-dismissed, the system can be abused by the voters. But this reversed abuse is NOT OK either. I know it is impossible to make every game function flawless, because most of the time the flaw stems from the users, or players. But if there could be some improvement or prevention of such abuse, it will be greatly appreciated.